A Judge Called Him a Consummate Gentleman. He Has Been Held for 20 Years.

In February 2014, a man in his mid-40s stood up in a Maryland courtroom to argue for his own release. He had chosen to represent himself. After jurors spent nearly two days without agreeing, the judge deferred to his doctors. Brian Bechtold had lost, and he would be sent back to the hospital.

Then the judge paid him an unusual compliment.

“You have been perhaps the most consummate gentleman in this courtroom that I’ve ever seen,” the judge told him. Bechtold thanked him in return, saying he thought the judge had been excellent and the trial had been fair.

More than 20 years earlier, at age 23, Bechtold had shot his parents in their Maryland home and then turned himself in to police in Port St. Joe, Florida. After his sisters hired him a lawyer, the lawyer told Makeda Brotman, a certified psychoanalyst who later volunteered at his hospital, that his first impression was that Bechtold was “a very pleasant young man, but obviously insane.” His sister Kathy said to investigators that Bechtold had “never been right in the head,” and two sisters expressed sympathy, saying that in his right mind he would never have been capable of such an act.

In July 1992, a psychiatrist concluded Bechtold had schizophrenia, paranoid type, and could not understand that his conduct was criminal. He was found Not Criminally Responsible, which meant no trial. He was sent to Clifton Perkins State Hospital, with no fixed sentence and no release date.

His clarity kept surfacing there. In 2005, a routine chest X-ray found a shadow on his lung. Doctors suspected lung cancer and wanted to treat it, but Bechtold refused. His psychiatrist said he was not competent to make such a serious decision, and the hospital sought authority to decide for him. With no family member available to act for him, Bechtold chose to argue his case before a jury himself.

“If a doctor says he wants to perform a biopsy, you have every right to say, ‘No, thank you,’ and go on your way,” he told jurors. “Individuals have autonomy, and things can’t be done to them without their consent.” The case ended in a mistrial on a technicality. A later X-ray showed a mass 13 centimeters wide, and then the mass disappeared on its own.

Brotman met Bechtold in 2013, when he joined a reading group she led on short stories. She said he always seemed “perfectly articulate, sensible, intelligent” and that “I saw no sign of mental illness.” She was shocked to learn he had already been at Perkins for more than 20 years.

At the 2014 trial over whether he remained ill and dangerous, a senior hospital psychiatrist told the court his illness was subtle and could be identified only by psychiatrists who had known him a long time, though she said she had spoken at length with him only once, just before trial. According to Brotman, Bechtold was impressed because the judge treated him like anyone else, fairly and without hostility, for the first time in his experience with authority.

An outside forensic psychiatrist who met with Bechtold four times said his thinking showed no psychosis and concluded, “with reasonable medical certainty,” that he “would not be a danger to himself or others if released into the community.” His sister Kathy, who lives in Ohio, has said she would take him in and look after him if he were freed.

Brotman said two things work against him. His sister lives far away and has problems of her own, so he has little support outside. And he has now been at Perkins longer than most doctors and staff, who never knew the younger patient who tried to cooperate and follow the rules. They know him, she said, only by reputation as “this violent murderer who conceals weapons in his cell.”